We are always told that business requirements come first and software requirements come after. Data capture, however, can benefit from a converse view: If you have a capture system driving one data-centric business process, can the same principle, and indeed the same system, be applied to all of your data-centric business processes? Automated capture upfront of any business process is likely to produce cleaner data, resulting in higher quality information, less exception handling and better process management. The more important the process is to your business, the greater the impact such improvements will have.

In a 2011 survey of AIIM community members, we explored the decision-making issues of capture-to-process versus capture-to-archive, measured the breadth of media capture and levels of integration across common business processes and looked at the issues that managers face when endeavouring to broaden the application of capture-to-process.

In this survey, only 23% of organizations outsource any of their scanning and capture needs — we normally measure over 30%. Back-file conversion was the most popular outsourced task. Less than 3% use outsourcers as the primary mechanism for their scan and capture processes. Surprisingly, 16% of the largest organizations answering this survey have no formal mechanism for systematic scanning and capture, compared to 28% of the smallest.

Most companies now find themselves dealing with incoming correspondence in both paper and electronic format. Although the character recognition process itself becomes unnecessary with an all-electronic file (as opposed to a scanned document or fax), these documents are frequently unstructured or semi-structured, and capturing data from the file for indexing or further processing will still require an intelligent capture process. Of those organizations scanning-to-process, nearly three-quarters also capture data from electronic documents, such as emails, web forms, PDF files, etc. Only 4% capture exclusively from electronic documents. Those not currently capturing electronic documents show a strong intention of moving in that direction.

Even among the respondents of this survey, 40% of organizations have only capture-enabled up to three processes, and for a quarter, it is just one or two processes. In many cases, these will be high-volume applications dedicated to one or two core functions of the business and may have been in place for many years. As we would expect, smaller organizations are likely to have fewer enabled processes, but even in the largest organizations or business units, 21% have three or fewer processes.

In terms of the types of process being capture-enabled, as we would expect, external line-of-business forms processing is most popular (60%), then invoices and finance (52%) and then dealing with customer correspondence (42%).

The biggest impediment to greater use of scan-to-process would seem to be a lack of awareness on the part of the business process owners, along with the technical issues of interconnection with other enterprise systems. Given that in 37% of organizations, business process owners are the most likely group to make decisions about scan-to-process projects, this lack of awareness is obviously an issue. However, despite this general lack of awareness, there is a strong appetite among our respondents to move forward in this area.

DOUG MILES is director of the AIIM Market Intelligence Division. He has over 25 years experience of working with users and vendors across a broad spectrum of IT applications. For the full report, visit www.aiim.org.